Sometimes
by daysandweeks
Summary: Penelope sees by the look in Henry's eye that sometimes, he's not really there. Henry and Penelope are married, but this focuses on Henry's feelings for Diana.


_**A/N:**__ I'm really hoping __Splendor__ ends on a happy HD note, but this piece is my interpretation of what would happen if it doesn't. This story is an interpretation of Henry and Penelope's marriage but reflects mainly on Henry's relationship with Diana. Hope you like it!_

**Sometimes**

_by daysandweeks_

Sometimes, if Penelope looked at Henry from a certain angle or in a certain light, she could tell that he did not want to be where he was. Even more than that, he simply wasn't there. He might laugh at a party, smile at her when she approached him at a dinner or some other social gathering, and even offer helpful wisdom towards their son and daughter when necessary. But always there was that far-off look in his eyes, that half-hearted grin on his face that said Henry was never where he wanted to be.

There were little moments when Penelope thought Henry might have forgotten about her, if only for just a few seconds. There was their daughter's eighteenth birthday, for example, which was a rather grand affair. When Stella glided down the staircase, her dark hair held high and her eyes sparkling with excitement, Henry's face lit up as it had not in some time. And when their son, Andrew, came to them just a few months later announcing that he was to be married to a girl he had loved for some time, a girl who loved him back, Henry truly smiled, seeming to actually focus on his surroundings for the first time in a while.

But sometimes, _usually_, Henry was not truly present. Towards the beginning of their marriage, Henry had showed this by drunkenness, and then actually physically not being present and going off to war. Shortly thereafter he returned his alcohol, seeming to ignore Penelope's miscarriage, and not just out of grief. He ignored his wife as well, preferring a night with a bottle of whisky to a night with her.

After the birth of their son he became more attentive. Andrew had only been made on a drunken whim. Penelope had seen that look in Henry's eyes that told her he'd been thinking of that wretched girl and that perhaps he'd even seen her in some crowded store or through the window of a restaurant, surely with another man. She had taken advantage of that, telling him to forget, telling him that she loved him even though she knew she'd fallen out of love long ago, though not as soon as he had, if he had even ever loved her.

He slept with her some nights, but only some. They had different beds and different rooms and different social spheres and did not need to encounter one another. Their children never knew their parents to be loving or even to talk to one another much. Once, Stella expressed surprise and even slight disgust towards her mother after visiting a friend whose parents had openly kissed one another. Penelope had shaken her head in disapproval, but deep down wanted to scream as she sometimes did at her children. _Don't you know!? Don't you know that's what people do when they love one another!?_

Sometimes Penelope caught Henry at strange hours. Very early in the morning or extremely late at night he would find an empty room and a lamp and a newspaper and pour through it, devouring columns he otherwise ignored ravenously. Sometimes he fell asleep in the chair he had been sitting in, the paper open-faced in his lap, his finger on the article that had been the object of his intent study. The ink was always smeared so that the words practically ran together. Sometimes there was an image accompanying the story, and if there was it was obvious that he had traced his fingers along it, smudging the outline of a girl who, as time went on, progressed into a young lady and then into a woman.

Penelope originally worried that Henry was an adulterer. If he didn't see the girl he so obsessively followed, then he certainly saw other women. But her worries soon subsided. In all actuality, she didn't really care as long as he wasn't seeing _that girl_, and when it became evident that he wasn't, Penelope relaxed. After all, she only sometimes found him asleep over a worn-out newspaper. She never found him poring over letters in feminine handwriting, and when he disappeared he almost always returned smelling of alcohol, not of clandestine meetings in parks and alleyways.

She knew that one day they would both die, and that more likely than not Henry would die before her. He was slightly older and had many bad habits, alcohol being only one of them. She sometimes worried that she would die first though, of embarrassment if not of anything else. She tired of reading hints towards his sexual affairs in social columns, but always, _always_ upon scolding him, she realized that it was all so much better than him leaving Penelope for _her_.

There were moments when Henry kissed Penelope like he used to. There were times when he purchased her small gifts. But always there was that glaze over his eyes, that broken expression on his face.

Penelope did not complain about Henry's behavior for many years. When she did, it was yet another night where she'd found him sitting with a newspaper in his lap. His eyes were wide open and bloodshot from lack of sleep and the ink from the article and the picture he'd been so focused on was completely smeared. Penelope could make nothing out.

"Why are you like this?" Penelope asked him, her hands balled into fists. "It's been twenty-five years. Why are you still like this?"

Henry had long given up pretending. He looked up at Penelope and simply smiled.

For in his mind he had not been in the parlor, reading about Diana Holland. He was in her family's parlor, watching her wear his hat. He was in her bedroom when she was just a young woman, sipping a glass of wine, kissing her, and making love to her. He was on a train after his marriage to Penelope, trying to express how sorry he was just by the angle of his head and the story that his eyes told. He was at a ball years later, and she walked into the room and walked out upon seeing him and then returned, her head held high. He was at her wedding, fading into the background, wondering if she loved the man she exchanged vows with half as passionately as she had loved him and as he had loved her. He was passing her on the street as she stepped into an automobile, a glinting look in her eye that said, _I know you…and I know our mistakes._

Henry closed the newspaper, pushing aside thoughts of the article he'd been reading, though he'd been happy to hear Diana's oldest child, a daughter, was soon to be married. "Why am I still like this?" he answered, amused by the belligerent expression on his wife's face that he had hardly seen these past few years. She'd become remarkably passive, which had made things somewhat tolerable.

"Yes," she said, calming down a bit. A loose strand of graying hair fell across her face and she pushed it aside. "Why?"

Henry smirked now. "Because if I was always here, if there wasn't those moments I've had to think of, I would be trapped, wouldn't I? But this way I'm not. Not always. Only sometimes."

He stood up and kissed Penelope on the cheek. He half-expected her to slap him, but when she didn't, Henry simply said, "Good night" and then proceeded to leave the room, headed for his suite.

She did not know what dreams awaited him there, what small escape he had. For when he closed his eyes, it was always to see Diana, smiling at him as he appeared to her in Teddy Cutting's clothes, knowing that she held his heart in her hands and openly giving hers to him, not for the time being, not sometimes.

But for always.

_**A/N:**__ You've read it! Now please review it!_


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